And the We Hunted the Mammoth Award goes to …

I didn’t bother to watch the VMAs last night, but something in the air has led me to want to give out some awards of my own. So: the coveted Man Boobz “We Hunted the Mammoth” Award this month goes to some comments from MRA oddball Uncle Elmer on women in the workplace that were recently highlighted on the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog. They are, of course, magnificently stupid.

Without further ado, here are some of the choicer bits of Elmer’s rant.

Women are competing for jobs but are not creating them. Other than providing a mass market for their vanity products, they are not forging new industries or technologies. …

Though men shank me and insult me, only men provide me with opportunity. … Only men, and only a small fraction of them, take the risks that create industry and opportunity. Women can only serve as mere functionaries in man-created structures. When an organization becomes feminized, priority shifts from efficient and profitable production of goods and services to development of labarynthine rules for the comfort and security of women. …

No woman can or will provide me or any man employment, yet all western women feel entitled to help and opportunities from men, even as they drive men out of the workplace.

[W]orkplace women are your enemy. They cannot help you but can and will hurt you. Do not look at them, do not talk to them.

And now the “we hunted the mammoth” moment:

Females want to inhabit man-created business structures as if those structures existed before man appeared on the veldt. … When you have pushed the last man out of the corporation it will collapse under its own dead weight.

And while I’m handing out awards, I’d like to give the Man Boobz Whaaaa?! Award for the strangest, dumbest and least true thing said about me in the past week to Wytchfinde (presumably the same guy who used to comment here as Wytchfinde555), who posted this strange and not-altogether-grammatical comment on my latest YouTube video (which you should all go watch if you haven’t already).

David Futrelle is an opportunist that pretends to worship white women (which is true to a certain extent) helps just fuel more fire for hating men.

Which is why meat is murder, however the bias against cannibalism on “moral” grounds is speciest hypocrisy. If it’s immoral to eat one species of animal, it’s immoral to eat all species of animal, is what I believe.

But seriously, I am For Teen Girls too, you know. I fail to see how being both a vegan and open-minded regarding age-disparate relationships involving teenage are inconsistent and incompatible. They are both pro-life positions, you know.

Holly: I clicked on it and I was like MEH. Internet, what have you done to me? WHY AM I NOT DISTURBED?

PSA: I am a vegan and I do not believe in cannibalism or that meat is murder, or that teenagers should be allowed to sleep with adults, or that weird loli porn with chicks laying eggs is appropriate to link in a public forum. The majority of vegans are far more sensible than JUANDELACRUZ. Please do not judge the rest of us based on him.

See, I’m just ashamed because while I’ve never seen that specific one before, I know precisely what it belongs to. My Life With Monster Girl is pretty meh, overall, and terrible porn in addition.

I really shouldn’t say this in the wake of my saying “It’s not up to us to prove a stupid stereotype isn’t true”, but I will point out that folks like Juan are hated even in anime fandom, even in the west. It’s one thing to be an @channer or 4chan poster or whatnot, and one thing to like stuff from someplace else, but it’s rather another to post weird screeds about fucking kids and young-as-hell teens, or post porn in public on SFW spaces.

IT was too bizarre to be disturbing. It certainly wasn’t sexy (though it appears to be some sort of sexual).

I wanted to add, to the hunting question: there is a moderate amount of evidence that in modern H/G societies, women/children provide a moderate amount of the meat as well. Men go after the larger game, and women/children collect frogs, birds, and small mammals.

Seasonal plenty (like shad/salmon runs) were almost certainly group activities.

KathleenB: You got to handle Mississippian pottery? Cool beans. I am so jealous.

I’ve had the chance to handle some interesting things, but that’s at least as cool as an enlistment schilling from one of the few British soldiers to die at Culloden (which was only a couple of hours out of the ground; I wonder if I could track down who it was. He enlisted while William, (of William and Mary) was still on the throne).

KathleenB: Nah, those pottery people love putting the sherds back together, don’t they? It’s like a puzzle, except with no picture on the boxtop and possibly using carcinogenic glues.

Pecunium: That’s so awesome. I’m a prehistoric kind of girl myself, but when you get rare historic stuff and may actually be able to trace it to the person who owned it… It makes me jealous sometimes.

And then there’s the Agta, where most women hunt. The men don’t share their more efficient hunting tools, so women get the crappier stuff. They also get to go out into the jungle with a baby attached to their back. Somehow, though, their return rate is better, on average, than the men’s. There’s also the Mbuti, where the net hunting groups with a mix of men and women do the best, to the point where the men don’t bother to go out if the women have decided to do something else that day. Also, the Inuit who didn’t have sons would teach their daughters to hunt. It’s amazing how little foraging groups look like the ev psych ideal.

Pecunium: VERY carefully, terrified all the while that I would drop it. I was helping a friend who redesigned the museum exhibit. The collection is actually freaking HUGE, some potdigger in the 19th century willed it all to the University. All grave goods, of course, but no real way to prove patrimony under NAGPRA – most Mississipian stuff dates to before modern tribes really came into being – and no tribes really willing to take the collection on (though I doubt the Univ really tried all that hard).

I just had somebody tell me they helped discover a sabretooth….salmon. Yeah, there goes dinner. Sabretooth? Holy cow.

Last trip I made to the Ukraine—-Pecunium probably saw this, too, unless I’m getting you mixed up with somebody else—-the ruins at Hersoness, which were Greco Roman. There are churches in Kiev, too, which have been carefully excavated in layers so you can see the levels of civilization. I could have just happily stayed there, exploring all the historic sites,for the next seventy frillion years.

My favorite was the local (which has become a dirty word for me due to a few very bad experiences) who claimed that the river cobble he found that was maybe a foot across was a fossilized duck gizzard. “You know, from when ducks were really big”.

I would sincerely love to dig in Eurasia someday. Hell, even doing one of those touristy trips to see the ruins and a couple of sites would be amazing.

Whereas I, of course, have never seen a minute of it. Obviously. Especially not at my age (34). And I definitely am not holding out for the dub of Season 3.

It’s okay…I resisted that series for the longest time because the impression I got from the fandom was that it was nothing but dudes snogging as a metaphor for international politics. I’m surprised none of the people telling me “No, it’s really funny, you should watch it,” bothered to add “And the fans grossly exaggerate the amount of actual yaoi in it.”

The difference there being that Harry Potter is a British children’s/YA book series, and Hetalia is a manga/anime series. I can be excused for taking the fan portrayal of a manga/anime series at face value. Ain’t nothin’ off the table in that category of media.

That’s like saying I can assume Harry Potter is all teens having sex because harlequin romance novels are books too, right? There’s nothing off the table in books!

Seriously, there’s no point in that kind of conflation. Fandom in general loves shipping, and this seems to cross all media, and almost all genres. Give people decent characters, and a significant number will just want to imagine who’s fucking who. Fans shipping isn’t evidence that the series is predominantly oriented on romance or sex.

Heck, I’ve seen a lot more shipping where these things aren’t explicit than where they are.

I dunno, canon relationships in Hetalia can be pretty fucked up…and the fandom amplifies that to the max. But when all the characters are countries, shit like the Cold War and the Rape of Nanking are legitimate pairings. (Yes. Yes that latter one is a real fic. Not gonna lie, Hetalia fandom does deserve a little bit of its reputation. ^^;)

That’s like saying I can assume Harry Potter is all teens having sex because harlequin romance novels are books too, right? There’s nothing off the table in books!

And if I knew nothing about Harry Potter other than that it was a book series, I would also be justified in suspecting that the fandom was portraying it accurately. But knowing that it was a children’s book series, I could be a little more confident that the fans were just being fannish.

Let me put it another way: if you knew nothing about Harry Potter and asked its fans “What’s the genre?”, they probably would not say “romance,” even if that’s the way they treat it in fanfic and fanart. They would say “fantasy.” But you can find any number of Hetalia fans who start out by saying “It’s a yaoi series.” And it’s really not. If you’ve ever seen a real yaoi series, you can tell that Hetalia ain’t one. The creator invites you to interpret it that way if you want, but in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge fashion rather than making it unambiguous.

Of course, I say all this as someone who has little patience for shipping in any case. I’m not particularly fond of romance in fiction. I watch Hetalia for the comedy, and the sheer outrageous joy of watching the dub be more crazy and offensive than the original.

What am I supposed to do? I don’t have time to read/watch everything in order to figure out what it’s about and whether it would be worth looking into further. I have to go by what people tell me…and what people were telling me about Hetalia was that it was really funny and that it was a yaoi series. Should I have assumed they were lying, but only about the second part?

I have to go by what people tell me…and what people were telling me about Hetalia was that it was really funny and that it was a yaoi series.

This is entirely fair — if I was trying to be precise I would not describe Hetalia as “yaoi” (the main “marriage” is heterosexual, in fact) but when my sister asked me to recommend an anime series that was “funny and gay” I showed her Hetalia and she thought it perfectly nailed her checklist ’cause it’s very tease-y and the vast majority of characters are pretty and male (which a lot of fans use “yaoi” as a kind of shorthand for.)

I usually see those get focused on for other things. Fandom is weird like that.

Yeah, okay, fair enough. I’ve actually made that observation myself. Call it a 95-5 rule: 95% of fanworks for a given series focus on 5% of the actual content. Still, “start by assuming it’s not very much like the fandom portrays it” is not very helpful, because you have no way of knowing what the other 95% of the content is like.

Wikipedia the basic premise, or find a specific individual you can already trust to give you basics.

You are assuming I did not already do these things. *gasp* You’re Rutee-splaining!

the vast majority of characters are pretty and male (which a lot of fans use “yaoi” as a kind of shorthand for.)

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.